Ventoline #3 – été 2021

This thrid edition of mnemotope magazine features pieces from contributors that range from playlist, recipes to poetic essays to drawings to private messages to a screenplay and beyond.

Mnemotope is a community magazine, published by bog bodies press. Mnemotope magazine takes this as its inspiration-it acts as a place in which lots of stories from across timelines and borders can sit together, and cultural memories can interact. It exists to create and hold the expression and knowledge of its diverse community, because of this, the contents of the magazine are wonderfully varied; some confessional poetry, some hastily notated recipes, some fiction, some history, lots of other things, all submitted during an open call. The format put spreads together of contributions that seem to somehow be in dialogue with one another.

The name of the magazine comes from a term that's used in writings about archaeological finds - it's a little complex when we speak about it abstractly, so take, for example, a bog body. A bog body is an object, but when we look at one it takes on another function as an image. This image is the part beyond the physicality of the object-it's what makes us think about what the world must have been like when this person was walking on it, what they looked like, what they did, who found them, how much the area they were found in must have changed and so on and so on and so on. A mnemotope is something that compresses time, and allows you to be in the bog two thousand years ago and in the museum looking at the body and at home reading about it all at once.

The fifth issue of Rab-Rab: Journal of Political and Formal Inquiries in Art includes stories about nation traitors, fierce masses, socialist women struggles, love-forms, psychedelic counter-revolutionaries, workers unions, Brecht fiddlers, jazz surrealism, Soviet trains, and anti-fascism.

Among the contributors to the fifth issue are Anna Thew, Yehuda Safran, Peter Gidal, Cana Bilir-Meier, David Black, Marjo Liukkonen, Alejandro Pedregal, Peter Hallward, Minna Henriksson, and Jyrki Siukonen.

It has also two extensive dossiers. One dedicated to Franklin Rosemont is presented by Joe Feinberg and is introducing some unpublished and difficult to find texts parallel with writings of T-Bone Slim and Joe Hill. The other dossier on Robert Linhart is presented by Tevfik Rada, and it includes a translation of a chapter from Linhart's book on productivism, an article against Western bourgeois dissidents, and an interview with him.

The first book dedicated exclusively to the female protagonists of Latin American electronic music.

The book has been edited by independent curator, researcher and label head of Buh Records, Luis Alvarado, and experimental musician, multimedia artist and researcher Alejandra Cárdenas (also known as Ale Hop).

Composers and sound artists featured in this historical account include: Alicia Urreta, Beatriz Ferreyra, Elsa Justel, Eulalia Bernard, Graciela Castillo, Hilda Dianda, Ileana Pérez Velázquez, Irina Escalante Chernova, Iris Sangüesa, Jacqueline Nova, Jocy de Oliveira, Leni Alexander, Margarita Paksa, Marietta Veulens, Mónica O'Reilly Viamontes, Nelly Moretto, Oksana Linde, Patricia Belli, Renée Pietrafesa Bonnet, Rocío Sanz Quirós, Teresa Burga, Vania Dantas Leite, among others.

The official history of 20th-century avant-garde electronic music has been predominantly narrated from the point of view of Anglo-American and Western European experiences and largely remained focused on its male protagonists. To destabilize this history, this editorial project presents a collection of perspectives, essays, interviews, archival photos, and work reviews centered on the early electronic music production by Latin American female creators, who were active from the 1960s to the 1980s. The book also brings us closer to the work of a new generation of researchers who have focused on offering a non-canonical reading of the history of music and technology in Latin America. The publication is the record of a new vision, an account of the condition of being a woman in the field of music technology at a time when this was a predominantly masculine domain. The decision to take electronic technologies for sound creation as the backbone of this history is related to the intention of broadening our focus of interest outside the spectrum of institutional electroacoustic music to include other experimental, interdisciplinary and sonic arts practices involving new technologies, beyond the circuits of academic avant-garde music.

The texts that make up this publication are organized spatially and conceptually, rather than following a chronology. The selection of female composers profiled sheds light on a variety of relevant aspects: key musical contexts, experiments with technologies (such as tape, electronic synthesis, the first commercial synthesizers), diverse formats (i.e., radio art, electroacoustic pieces, installation, multimedia, theater, film, etc.), intertwined with themes, such as migration, memory, identity, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, social engagement, the acceptance of electronic music, etc. Moreover, the framework of this editorial project opened a space for intergenerational dialogue and a meeting of aesthetics, as many of the authors gathered as collaborators are composers and sound artists themselves.

In 2019 SOTA finished the first Fair Arts Almanac. The content of the book was generated during a week long summer camp in 2018 with about 70 contributors. The result was a bundling of tips & tricks, statements & demands, visions & ideas, dates & data, testimonies & voices, addresses & announcements on fairness within the complex relationships between the artistic, political and economic sphere. The compilation of various contributions in this first edition was deliberately associative and open for debate, full of contradictions, loose ends and inconsistencies.

“the following text was written in July 2024 in St Imier, Switzerland.
it's a fragment of Lettres à Bébé, a book I've been writing for some time in which I - Ethan - find myself helping and communicating by letter with a Marxist Baby whose political project is not to grow up so as not to become a tool of Capital. While he develops his project and tells it to me, I live my life and tell it too, observing and commenting on the ignoble state of the world, its language, its architecture, managing my heartbeat, meeting people, working, fucking, eating (...)”. - Ethan Assouline

Published by La Dépendance, St imier (2024)